Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: Reinventing recycling

30 minutes

Find Out: Waste statistics

15 minutes

Take Action: Opportunities for change

5 minutes

Reflection

Tune In: Reinventing recycling

Step 1

Explore the two resources below to build the class's understanding of the Containers for Change scheme in Western Australia.

First, watch the video WA | Scheme Overview (Captions) and discuss how the initiative works. You may have watched this already in Lesson 2: Don’t Feed the Fill, but revisiting it and refreshing students' understanding is a good idea. Then, show the Reinventing Your 10¢ Containers Poster and identify the types of containers that can be recycled through Containers for Change. Is there anything included on the poster that they are surprised about? Are there any containers missing that they expected to see there?

Step 2

Explain to students that Western Australia Containers for Change collects data on different types of containers sold and recycled in Western Australia. Today the class will investigate these statistics to explore how the recycling schemes are being used, but before investigating, we will make some predictions.

Explain to the class that the materials that can be recycled are:

aluminium
glass
HDPE - High-density polyethylene (a type of firm plastic)
LPB - liquid paper board (milk cartons etc)
PET - Polyethylene terephthalate (the plastic most soft drink bottles are made of!)
steel.

Invite students to complete the first section of their worksheet by:

ordering the items to show which you predict are produced the most to least in Western Australia
ordering the items to show which you predict are recycled the most to least in Western Australia.

Provide the opportunity for students to share their predictions and explain how they decided upon their choices.

Find Out: Waste statistics

Step 1

Explain to students that they will now conduct an investigation to explore the following question:

How do the recycling trends in Western Australia line up with the containers produced?

Step 2

Provide students with the ‘Recycling Data’ worksheet and explain that we will create graphs to present the information in an easy-to-understand manner. Before starting, discuss with the students:

What information does this table show?
What questions do you think we could answer with this information?

Explain that we want to find out if there are any differences between the proportions of containers produced and the proportion that are recycled. To do this, we will create two pie charts to be presented side-by-side using digital technologies.

Extension: Rather than telling students what chart to make, you could have the following discussion with your students. What type of data display do they think would best answer this question? Students may come up with side-by-side pie charts, side-by-side bar graphs, clustered bar graphs, or something different!

As students explore this, you can discuss graphs that won’t give us the information we are looking for, such as one pie chart with all the data. This won’t allow us to compare the proportions in a meaningful way. You could use an Options Diamond to compare and contrast the different graphs and find out what will give you the best coverage. Students who are fluent with spreadsheets could try creating multiple graphs before selecting which is the most appropriate.

Once we have confirmed the display type we will use, each student will need to open a fresh spreadsheet (e.g. Google Sheets, Excel, or Numbers) and save it with an appropriate title. From the worksheet, they will need to split their data into two tables like so:

Ask students to check their headings, colours, labels and chart title to make sure they are appropriate. The final result may look like this:

Once they are happy with their charts, they can copy them and paste them into a document.

If you have downloaded the Student Worksheet as a .docx file rather than a .pdf file, you can provide each student with a digital copy of the worksheet. This will let them paste the graphs directly into this document and answer the follow on questions, giving them an opportunity to practice their digital literacy skills and providing a formative assessment opportunity.

Once they have their graphs, ask them to complete the 'See, Think, Wonder' activity provided in the worksheet and answer the following questions:

See:

Which items are proportionally recycled more than produced?

Which items are proportionally recycled less than produced?

Which items proportionally are recycled about the same as they are produced?

Think:

Why do you think glass is recycled at a proportionally higher rate?

Why do you think liquid paper board is recycled at a proportionally lower rate?

Wonder:

I wonder how we influence people’s recycling habits. Choose a material we have looked at today and write your ideas below.

Take Action: Opportunities for change

Step 1

Reconvene as a class and discuss the findings. You may wish to display a student example so that the data can be seen during the class discussion.

Invite students to discuss the following questions:

Were your predictions about what is produced the most in WA similar to reality?
Were your predictions about what is recycled the most in WA similar to reality?

Step 2

Using the Think-Pair-Share approach, invite students to discuss their answers from the Student Worksheet.

Reflection

Give students time to reflect on the following question. You may wish to discuss these ideas as a class or use this as an exit ticket strategy.

What am I going to do differently after this lesson?

Containers for Change WA - How Does it Add Up?

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Summary

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